Pete Bleackley
Associate Editor

Try now to think about jokes involving structural ambiguity (morphological structure, syntactic form or syntactic function).

As before, explain the source of the humour, in an unambiguous manner!

While the answer I gave on her website correctly explained the structural ambiguity present in the joke, it was far from an exhaustive analysis of the source of the humour. I here expand on it to present a more thorough explanation of the phenomena involved.

A man is having his garden landscaped, and he says to the gardener “I want decking over here.” So the gardener flattens him with a spade.

The ambiguity arises because “decking” (wooden paving resembling a boat deck4) sounds like a present participle. The expression “X wants/needs Ying”5, 6 can be used to mean “X should be Yed”. Finally, the word “deck” can be used as a verb meaning “to strike someone down”7—“flatten” is used in the same sense.

Therefore “I want decking over here,” can mean either “I want wooden flooring over here,” or “I should be struck down over here.”

We must now examine the pragmatics of the utterance. “I want wooden flooring over here,” is clearly a more reasonable interpretation than “I should be struck down over here,” as few people want to be violently assaulted.8 The context of the utterance—that the man is having his garden landscaped—further reinforces this. The gardener’s choice of the unreasonable interpretation therefore violates Grice’s Maxim of Relation. In doing so it creates surprise, which is the key ingredient of humour.

However, we are left wondering why the gardener would choose the clearly unreasonable interpretation. Marx9 would suggest that the client’s greater wealth and status places him in a position of undeserved privilege over the gardener, whose interpretation of the sentence constitutes an act of revolution against his bourgeoise oppressor. In this interpretation, the humour derives from Schadenfreude.10 JRR Tolkien, however would dispute this.11 In The Lord of The Rings, Frodo’s gardener, Samwise Gamgee,12 is his most loyal friend, and eventually emerges as the true hero of the story. For Tolkien, therefore, the heroism of the Working Class is necessarily founded on loyalty rather than rebellion.

This excursion into literary theory has therefore shed little, if any, light on the matter.13 We must therefore reexamine the premises of the joke. Why do we consider it more reasonable that the client wants wooden paving than a blow on the head? Consider the following. The purpose of a garden is to grow plants. Paving parts of the garden reduces the space available to grow plants, and is thus antithetical to the purpose of gardening. A man who wants such a thing is clearly a philistine, ignorant of the finer points of horticulture. It is probable that his entire interest in gardening comes from watching populist TV programmes, most likely in the hope of seeing the presenter’s dimmocks. And that’s why he wants decking.

3 Any connotation of drunkenness in this expression should be taken as implying nothing more than that I like making scurrilous remarks about my fellow satirical linguists.14, 15

4 This was popularized in the UK by Ground Force, a television programme in which the presenters would enter somebody’s property without their knowledge while they were away and make over their garden.16 One of the presenters was a builder,17 so there always had to be decking.

11 While Tolkien is often identified with a traditionalist worldview,22 he is not entirely unsympathetic to Marxist theory. The Dwarves in The Hobbit wish to recover the wealth they laboured to create from an oppressor who has taken it by force, and the song they sing before setting out23 fits very nicely to the tune of The Red Flag.24, 25

22 Feminist critics, in particular, note that none of Tolkien’s main female characters meet each other at any point during The Lord of the Rings.30 However, such an encounter would lead to Tolkien violating the Maxim of Quantity even more than he does already.31, 32

31 Tolkien fundamentally misunderstood the Maxim of Quantity. He thought it meant “the more the merrier”.35, 36

32 There is also the issue of what they would talk about. If Arwen and Eowyn were to meet, a logical topic of conversation would be the latter’s defeat of the Witch King of Angmar. However, the Witch King of Angmar was a man.

33 This may have been a major contributing factor to the show’s popularity.

34 The fact that her given name37 was an item of bawdy slang38, 39 and her surname40 became one as a result41 didn’t help.

54 A reference to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Lawrence Sterne, a novel best described as an attempt to write an autobiography by a man who’s completely incapable of sticking to the point.

55 Now I’m explaining jokes in the middle of an article about explaining a joke. Meta-humour has reached dangerous levels.